Faking the footage ARTS
STUART HOOD
It was good to see television celebrating a real event—the Russian Revolution—and not some spurious landmark in the history of conimunica- tions like Twenty Years of BBC 1 or the Eighth Anniversary of the Black and White Minstrels. The undertaking was not without its dangers, however. It is sad that they were not avoided.
The making of a historical documentary on film has its peculiar difficulties. The proddcer is to an alarming degree at the mercy of chance. Was there a cameraman on the spot? If there was, what happened to his footage? Unless lam *much mistaken, some of the film of the Czar and his court used in the recent programmes on the October Revolution was found in New York in a suitcase under the bed of an aged White Russian : or so the story goes. The producer is also at the mercy of the film libraries where the staff are in general both efficient and eager to please. Yet time and time again their answer to a request for coverage of a particular incident is that they have none—or that they had but the vaults were flooded during the war—or that the negative is in too precarious a state to be used. Faced with lacunae in his narrative the producer finds himself in a moral dilernma. He has various choices open to him. He can simply fill the gap with some neutral shots—landscape, perhaps, or some sufficiently symbolical build- ing. He can use material from other similar situations—one lot of infantry running crouched across no-man's-land, whether at Loos, Ypres or on the Carpathian front, looks very much like another and shell-bursts are two a penny (although some of them are becoming pretty familiar). He can use post facto reconstructions such as clips from feature. Or he can himself reconstruct the missing material. At one time or another we have seen most 'of these techniques on our screens. Not, to be fair, that they have
been used without qualms—without sophisti- cated arguments like: Let's fake only the kind of thing a cameraman might have shot if he had been there.
Neither of the large-scale documentaries made by raw and Granada to commemorate or cele- brate the October Revolution was blameless. By their proximity in time they illustrated another danger inherent in the use of archival material—one which raises important questions of truth. In the BBC's World Turned Upside Down there were harrowing shots of starving peasants taken, it was implied, during 1922-23 when, as Tibor Szamuely has reminded us, six million of them died 'in the terrible famine created deliberately by the government . . . to pay for machines from the West.' In Granada's Ten Days that Shook the Workt the identical shots were used to demonstrate the plight of the pre-revolutionary countryside. Both statements cannot be true. No doubt the producers would argue that starving Russian peasants looked very much the same in 1903 or in 1923 and that the illustrations were not to be taken literally. But this is a very slippery slope.
There is a parlour game to be played when watching such productions. It is to make a technical appraisal of the shots as they come up—to say that top shot is suspect, that pan impossible in 1912, look at that zoom, that's feature film, where does it come from? Both programmes gave scope for this esoteric amuse- ment. The trouble is that the public at which the films are aimed cannot join in this exceedingly 'in' game—has no criteria for judging truth and falsehood. It is, in fact, being deceived by a brand of history which makes Arthur Mee read like Nam ie r.
To be fair to both sides they did—not always but usually—identify those points at which they included quotations from the great Russian film epics. The BBC, introducing Eisentein's storming of the Winter Palace, was explicit in its com- mentAy. Granada contented itself with minus- cule subtitles. But where did the wide angle shot of the infantry storming' Kronstadt come from in the BBC'S version, if not from We From Kronstadt? Nor was that the only unacknow- ledged quotation. As for Granada's production it was for long periods an anthology of early film in which the dramatic, beautifully com- posed pictures of Eisenstein leapt out from jumpy bits of contemporary documentary and stills. By the end my scepticism was complete.
Apart from these professional and technical dilemmas the compilation of the two documen- taries presented historical and ideological problems. Both were commemorative films, basically uncritical, basically accepting the legends of the Revolution. If Granada was the greater sinner in this respect it was because it used more featUre film. To quote Tibor Szamuely again : 'Soviet communications media
have functions entirely different from ours. . — Their object is not to enlighten but to indoctrin- - ate.' This applies even to the work of a genius like Eisenstein who, when he strayed into an exercise of the free imaginations, found that his work was mutilated and suppressed. If one builds his vision of the storming of the Winter Palace into a documentary one is necessarily accepting the Soviet myth. 'Who would have gathered from those dramatic pictures of the cruiser 'Aurora' opening fire that this was what Deutscher describes as a eomic opera touch? It was firing duds. Or understand from the vast melies in the Winter Palace that the number of dead could be counted on one hand? That the' rest of the city was seized without a shot being fired? The Granada version was a co- production with the Russians. They will be able to show it on Soviet television with hardly a cut. That is all right—it is their revolution. The British viewers deserved something more criti- cally detached. It should not have been left to the news bulletins to remind us, through the mouth of a man amnestied as part of the celebrations, that men are sitting in ice-boxes in labour camps not more than a Couple of hundred miles from Moscow.
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